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Life in a box: gender, migration and language in the bilingual archive of Truus van Bruinessen, a Dutch-Canadian housewife of the 1950s

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 02:15 authored by Maria Lauret
Unpublished and undistributed, Truus van Bruinessen’s collection of life-writings in Dutch (journal, letters, and travel writing) and English (memoir) only exists in a box in Canada’s National Archives. It documents its author’s migration to Canada and her domestic travails as a housewife of the 1950s, which include her lack of access to English. The archive provides a unique opportunity for the study of gender and language shift in adult migrants’ life-writing. Comparative analysis of van Bruinessen’s skilful and highly gendered use of the epistolary form in Dutch on one hand, and of her memoir in imperfect and belatedly acquired English on the other, reveals interesting differences in style, tone and content. Such analysis shows how a woman’s migrant subjectivity, originally constituted in Dutch, could not adequately be represented in English, as a talented writer’s mother tongue was twisted in (self-) translation.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal for Gender Studies / Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies

ISSN

1388-3186

Publisher

Amsterdam University Press

Issue

3

Volume

19

Page range

301-320

Department affiliated with

  • American Studies Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-07-26

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2016-08-09

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-07-26

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